Sean Spicer told CNN’s Michael Smerconish Saturday morning that the reports claiming the Russian government hacked the Republican National Committee during the 2016 election are false.
On Friday, the Washington Post and New York Times ran articles detailing a CIA “assessment” U.S. Congressmen received last week.
Jason Miller and Sean Spicer (Getty Images)
Hill staffers briefed on the assessment claim it states with “high confidence that [Russia] hacked the DNC and the RNC.”
The reports further claim that while the DNC documents were handed over to WikiLeaks for publication, the hackers “conspicuously released no documents” from the RNC breach, indicating “that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” the Post’s source explained.
Spicer, however, cast doubts on the reports Saturday, claiming that the RNC is working with separate U.S. intelligence agencies who have concluded that the RNC was not hacked.
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“The intelligence is wrong,” Spicer told Smerconish. “It didn’t happened. We offered the New York Times conclusive proof that it didn’t happen. They ignored it. They refused to look at it because it didn’t fit the narrative.”
Sean Spicer waves to reporters in Trump Tower (Getty Images)
“The bottom line is the intelligence is wrong,” he continued. “They are writing that the conclusion they came to was based in part on the fact the RNC was hacked. It wasn’t hacked. We have intelligence agencies that we worked with that are willing to sort this out.”
Spicer also criticized the media — and Smerconish personally — for accusing him of lying, when he’s “just trying to get the facts out there.”
“Michael, the New York Times in their story said that they based their conclusion on the fact that the RNC was hacked. If the RNC was not hacked, that casts doubt on their conclusions. I don’t understand why this is that difficult to understand.”
